Implantable medical devices, such as a stents, grafts, stent-grafts, vena cava filters and the like, and delivery assemblies for implantable medical devices are utilized in a number of medical procedures and situations, and as such their structure and function are generally known in the art.
A stent is an elongated device used to support an intraluminal wall. In the case of stenosis, a stent provides a conduit for blood in the area of the stenosis. Such a stent may also have a prosthetic graft layer of fabric or other covering lining the inside or outside thereof, such a covered stent being commonly referred to in the art as an intraluminal prosthesis, an endoluminal or endovascular graft (EVG), or a stent-graft.
A stent-graft may be used, for example, to treat a vascular aneurysm by removing the pressure on a weakened part of an artery so as to reduce the risk of rupture. Typically, a stent-graft is implanted in a blood vessel at the site of a stenosis or aneurysm endoluminally, i.e. by so-called “minimally invasive techniques” in which the stent-graft, restrained in a radially compressed configuration by a sheath or catheter, is delivered by a deployment system or “introducer” to the site where it is required. The introducer may enter the body through the patient's skin, or by a “cut down” technique in which the entry blood vessel is exposed by minor surgical means. When the introducer has been threaded into the body lumen to the prosthesis deployment location, the introducer is manipulated to cause the stent-graft to be ejected from the surrounding sheath or catheter in which it is restrained (or alternatively the surrounding sheath or catheter is retracted from the prosthesis), whereupon the stent-graft expands to a predetermined diameter at the deployment location, and the introducer is withdrawn. Stent expansion may be effected by a variety of mechanisms, including spring elasticity, balloon expansion, or by the self-expansion of a thermally or stress-induced return of a memory material to a pre-conditioned expanded configuration.
A stent-graft may include only a partial covering. Partially covered stent-grafts are particularly useful at a vessel branch or bifurcation, where the device may be positioned to cover an aneurism without an adverse consequential blocking of an opposing side branch vessel. Therefore, a partially covered stent-graft must be placed having a specific rotational orientation with respect to the surrounding environment.
There remains a need for a device which allows for proper rotational orientation of implantable medical devices within a bodily lumen.
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Without limiting the scope of the invention a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided as well only for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. 1.72. The abstract is not intended to be used for interpreting the scope of the claims.